Dylann Roof Was No Lone Madman

Randall
Law is Associate Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern College
and the author of Terrorism:
A History.

Last
Wednesday, a violent racist struck in South Carolina in a heinous
terrorist attack. Regardless of the banter back and forth across the
aisle, make no mistake about it. Dylann Roof is a terrorist.

Since
then, many have simply refused to call Roof’s violence an act of
terrorism. Indeed, to ignore his motives and ignore the nature of his
violence might allow us some measure of comfort. It has let us to think
that such an act is random, an accident of human psychology, an
individual aberration. It can’t really be understood. It has no
meaning. It’s not worth studying since it belongs to no larger
pattern or history, except, perhaps, to the pattern of human
fallibility.

But
that attitude is, at best, willful ignorance. At worst, it reeks of
white privilege and racism.

All
of the hallmarks of terrorism are present in Roof’s massacre of
nine innocents at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He
embraced the hate-filled ideology of white supremacy – a doctrine
every bit as vile, intolerant, and evil as the jihadism of ISIS –
and documented it online with text and images.

Just
before he attacked, Roof spoke to his victims: “I have come to kill
black people.” He then left one person alive so that she could tell
others what he had said and done – and instructed her to do so.
When caught, he quickly gave a confession to the authorities in which
he described his motives and made clear his goal of using his
ill-gotten fame to publicize his hatred and intimidate his racial
enemies.

Terrorism
is essentially symbolic violence that seeks to sway people’s
behavior; it goes after the few in order to intimidate the many. A
bloody act only becomes terrorism per
se when
a community understands that it has been targeted. This is why the
American public’s reaction to the Emanuel AME massacre has been
muddled. Americans have responded with near universal revulsion, but
there’s been much debate about the act’s meaning.

Many
blacks – and sympathetic whites – have reacted to the massacre
for what it is: an act of violence meant to terrorize and intimidate
the African-American community. Meanwhile, many white, conservative
pundits have downplayed the attack, speculating that it’s the act
of a lone gunman, a troubled youngster, a madman. Revulsion yes, but
a clear rejection of any symbolic meaning.

How
can we navigate this minefield and make sense of this act of
violence?

Let’s
consider his target. Roof didn’t simply stumble into any public
place and begin shooting. He made a deliberate choice, stating in his
confession that he attacked a church in Charleston, a community
hundreds of miles from his home, because of the city’s
concentration of African Americans. Should we take it as coincidence
that Emanuel AME Church is one of the oldest black churches in the
South, its pastor a prominent figure, its roots deep in Charleston’s
African-American community? When we combine Emanuel’s profile with
Roof’s explicit views on race and history, it is clear that this
Charleston landmark was a symbolically rich target, not a random one.

Moreover,
we see all the making of a rational plan, however distasteful such a
characterization appears to us: Roof wanted to strike at the heart of
South Carolina’s black community, to communicate to all blacks that
they are not welcome, to gain notoriety in order to advertise his
message

Let’s
also consider history, which is unfortunately filled with precedent.

The
Ku Klux Klan was the most successful terrorist group in American
history when it was active in the 1860s and 1870s. Southern white
supremacists sought to regain through a terrorist campaign what they
had lost in the Civil War and early Reconstruction.

After
they won – and yes, the KKK won this struggle – Southern
political elites re-established a system founded on white supremacy.
They set up Jim Crow laws to restore blacks to a position of
political, social, and economic subservience in the South, and the
Klan and related groups used lynching to police that system.

Between
1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 African Americans died at their hands,
according to a recent
study from the Equal Justice Initiative. And white supremacists
used terrorism – culminating in the murder of four young girls in
Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 – to resist the Civil Rights Movement
in the following decades.

Despite
the Movement’s many triumphs, the haters and their hatreds haven’t
gone away. The Internet and social media have given white
supremacists new ways to congregate virtually. In fact, the election
of President Obama, accelerating globalization, and transformational
demographic change have led to the growth of old hate groups and the
creation of new ones in recent years, as documented by the Southern
Poverty Law Center.

Terrorism
is an infection whose best disinfectant is bright sunlight. We –
all Americans, left, right, white, black – need to face the painful
truth of what happened in Charleston: Dylan Roof is the product of a
long-established, widely-held American tradition of racial hatred. In
other words, Roof is not alone. History shows us this quite clearly.

We
dismiss Roof as simply a troubled kid – a lone madman – at our
peril. Will we call out homegrown American violence as the terrorism
that it is? As a nation, we have a long way to go in our quest to
form a more perfect union, but this would be an appropriate step for
today.